David Starkey

“I could easily have spent one half of my life in a psychiatric hospital, and the other half in the Priory.”

“I'm a kind of double-breasted rebel in that I've always believed the important thing is that generations react against one another. For instance, there was always something oddly creative about the fact that Hanoverian sons hated their fathers so much.”

“Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they end up knowing more and more about less and less. It's a malaise that has now infected A-levels and GCSEs.”

“I've always challenged authority.”

“If you look at comparative figures, the last two episodes of 'Six Wives of Henry VIII' were watched by 4m. Graham Norton, who is very funny, gets 3m. Johnny Vaughan's comedy, which I have never seen but people say isn't very good, got less than half the viewers of 'Six Wives.'”

“It's one of the great mysteries to me how anybody who has ever believed in socialism can conceivably vote for Blair or New Labour, which is further to the right of any Tory government apart from that of John Major, and is taking privatisation into realms unheard-of.”

“I was outrageous on the 'Moral Maze.' The closest I sailed to the wind was when I almost outed a most saintly Cardinal in a talk on homosexuality in public life.”

“My parents were Quaker, and they were part of that old self-improving working class.”

“What is striking is how the reputation of the monarchy has gone up and down in my lifetime.”

“It's very easy to front 'The Weakest Link;' it takes 10 minutes to prepare. But it takes three months to prepare an hour-long history programme.”

“Our education system has been taken over by bean counters and narrow-mindedness.”

“Only bad teachers lecture at a tutorial.”

“Writing is a real activity conducted in real time.”

“If you make a book which is little more than putting a television script on the page, and add a few pictures, that would be a bad thing. But I would never do that because I happen to be very interested in language, in writing.”

“I've studied kings, so I'm very aware of the feet of clay of authority.”

“The BBC is in many ways wonderful, but it is not good at recognising when a programme has come to the end of its natural life.”

“I'm not a completely envy-free zone - I envy 25-year-old men with magnificent bodies - but when I look at my colleagues on the whole, I don't think I have much to envy!”

“I always bought pictures, I only started to buy oil paintings when I started to make serious amounts of money because they cost a serious amount of money.”

“The wives of Henry VIII are too big to be left to chick lit. Their importance is the impact they have on the broad history of the period. On the lives of every man and every woman who lived in England then, and subsequently has lived in England.”

“I was a complete and typical only child. I was bookish, and sport was out of the question anyway. I had read all of Dickens and most of the volumes of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia by the time I was 11. The only time I was popular at school was the day I won the debating competition for my house.”